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Niagara

Frederic Prokosch

‘Thomas Wolfe's enormous body and low, grumbling voice made the cutlery look like trinkets in a brittle Lilliput.’

A Few Words on the Life Cycle of Frogs

Patricio Pron

‘I wasn’t going to abandon the dream of literature, I was going to keep dreaming.’

Last Day on Earth

Eric Puchner

‘Despite my efforts at denial the new reality of our lives was beginning to sink in.’

Cohiba

Lucía Puenzo

‘She would leave everything behind not to lose him.’

Cupcake

Yana Punkina

‘His voice had long since lost all superfluous timbral embellishments, he was left with only the raw thread of screeching.’

Summer Tidings

James Purdy

‘He washed the quivering flesh of the wound in thick yellow soap.’

To the Dogs

Jianan Qian

A short story by Jianan Qian on stray dogs, desperation and re-education in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.

The Argentine Episcopate

Bernard Quiriny

‘I started working for the Bishop of San Julián in 1939, not long after the death of my husband.’

New World (Part Four)

Jonathan Raban

‘Sleep has disassembled the self: it will take patience to rebuild a person out of the heap of components in the bed.’

New World (Part Three)

Jonathan Raban

‘To my eyes, airplane always looked impertinently casual on the page; it robbed the amazing machine of its proper mystery.’

New World (Part One)

Jonathan Raban

‘At first sight the ship was bigger than the dock in which it floated, a whale sprawled in a hip-bath‘.

New World (Part Two)

Jonathan Raban

‘It was how Europeans had always seen American nature – as shockingly bigger, more colourful, more deadly, more exotic, than anything they’d seen at home.’

Fishes and Dragons

Undinė Radzevičiūtė

An excerpt from ‘Fishes and Dragons’ a Lithuanian literary chinoiserie that addresses the interpretation by a European of Qing dynasty culture and art.

In the Light of What We Know

Zia Haider Rahman

‘My wife and I were both the children of Pakistanis, immigrants, Muslims, and we had faith that our union was of things greater than ourselves.’